Will you believe that I have grief for the mother I loved before I was born, the mother I lost with my birth?
Category: Adoption
Adoption in general
Is it a battle worth fighting? Today I start a round of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), a therapy recommended for treating the effects of complex trauma, under the NHS. It’s taken me four long years to get here, with frustration and disappointments along the way. With all the hurdles I faced, there were […]
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Adoptee Voices 2023
I had a ‘good’ adoption but I hate adoption. I hate the sense of not belonging of always being outside/other. I resent the way non adoptees usually view adoption. I wish that I’d had support from someone with insight to work through my issues instead of finding the primal wound in my forties and realising that no not everybody feels or thinks that way about things. It totally screws with your head and relationships, definitely your relationships!
Let’s remember that we were children but children grow up into adults and those adults want answers as to who they are and where they came from. Coram IAC owes it to us and our next generation. We are not ornaments or souvenirs, we are people with a past history and an origin story that belongs to us.
We need the apology, we need the recognition, we need the acknowledgment that what was done to us was so wrong and we need help: we need help to heal, we need help to get our voices heard and we need the government to take accountability and to recognise the role they played
Freddie’s inability to communicate her true feelings echoes that of us all. We are silenced, unable to articulate the trauma that lives in our bodies. We as intercountry adoptees are made to feel grateful for being saved from a culture that is deemed inferior to western society. However, those same western societies see us as different. This is the paradox of being an intercountry adoptee. We don’t belong to either society and never will.
Beautiful reading from Maggie Lyng on Mother’s Day from the perspective as an adoptee. This is published in the loss section of A Page from my Life Thank you Maggie!
Every year, I struggled with this Day. Nobody knew. Not one person. Not a teacher, nor my parents, nor my extended family, nor my friends.
Recently Colin Kaepernick has spoken about his experiences growing up as an adoptee of colour. The thing which distinguishes his and so many other adoptions is that his adopters are white. The sad fact is that there are a disproportionate number of children of colour in the system and available for adoption. Take a look […]
Statement by Adult Adoptee Movement Friday 3 March, 2023 There is nothing new in the government’s response and even less of value. The only change they are proposing is one they are already consulting on. To say we have had the opportunity to have our voices and experiences heard and to then do precisely nothing […]